And the answer is, Yes. In fact, they’ve already survived millions of years of climate change.

Age of corals since they first appeared on Earth:

Corals are 500 million years old, and date back to the late Cambrian period, during the Paleozoic era – Source: the Global Reef Project

Climate change since then:

What is really hilarious is that right next to the ‘ARC Centre for Excellence’ release, is this one in the Eurekalert feed:

PUBLIC RELEASE: 1-SEP-2017

Can corals survive climate change?

Coral reef experts deliver urgent recommendations for future research

ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE IN CORAL REEF STUDIES

A group of international scientists, including scientists from Australia, have issued advice that more research is urgently required to determine whether corals can acclimatise* and adapt to the rapid pace of climate change.

The team of coral experts, led by Dr. Gergely Torda from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at James Cook University and the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), have delivered recommendations for future research.

As the Great Barrier Reef faces unprecedented coral mortality from back-to-back mass bleaching in 2016 & 2017, rising carbon dioxide and other natural and human-induced pressures, scientists advise more research is urgently needed into the poorly-understood mechanisms that corals might use to survive in a rapidly warming world.

“There is still a lot to understand about corals,” says Dr. Torda. “While our only real chance for their survival is to reverse climate change, a nugget of hope exists – that the corals may be able to adapt to their changing environment,” he says.

“However, there are major knowledge gaps around how fast corals can adapt or acclimatise to changes in their environment, and by what mechanisms they might use to achieve this,” adds co-author Professor Philip Munday of Coral CoE.

“For example,” explains Dr Jenni Donelson, co-author at Coral CoE,”recent studies show that fish can acclimatise to higher water temperatures when several generations are exposed to the same increased temperature, but whether corals can do the same, and how they might achieve this, is largely unknown.”

Eight research recommendations are published today in the prestigious journal Nature Climate Change and arise from a workshop with a team of experts composed of 22 biologists from 11 institutions in five different countries.

The team agrees that further research identifying how corals respond to climate change is critical, as the Earth undergoes an unprecedented rate of environmental change.

AIMS Climate Change Scientist, Dr. Line Bay says, “There is sufficient inertia in the climate system that we will not be able to prevent further climate-related disturbances affecting the reef in the immediate future.”

“Solutions are required to help corals adapt and acclimate to near-term future climate pressures while we figure out how to reduce emissions and halt and reverse longer-term climate change.”

Co-authors Prof. Timothy Ravasi and Dr. Manuel Aranda from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) warn that the clock is ticking. “The Great Barrier Reef has suffered substantial losses of coral over the past two years. Understanding the mechanisms that could enable corals to cope with ocean warming is becoming increasingly important if we want to help these ecosystems,” they say.

The paper is focused on stony, reef-building corals, which are the ‘ecosystem engineers’ of tropical coral reefs. These corals build the frameworks that provide shelter, food and habitat for an entire ecosystem. When corals are lost, the diversity and abundance of other reef organisms declines, until ultimately the ecosystem collapses.

“Predicting the fate of coral reefs under climate change is subject to our understanding of the ability of corals to mount adaptive responses to environmental change,” says Dr. Torda. “Our paper sets out key research objectives and approaches to address this goal.”

“The time to act is now, as the window of opportunity to save coral reefs is rapidly closing,” he concludes.

The coral reefs became extinct when first faced with climate change, ca. 499 million years ago. They were replaced by fake corals put there by benign aliens, who culd foresee the man-made climate disaster and controls the bleaching of the fake reefs in order to make us mend our ways, and stop flying. Except for Leonardo di Caprio and Ridley Scott, who have a special deal with the aliens.

Anyone who has the arrogance and hubris to call themselves a “CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE ” pretty surely is not.

Were they a CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE before they even started ? Or did they operate for a few years before deciding that if they did not call themselves a CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE , no one would notice how EXCELLENT they were?

Those who are really excellent have the modesty to remain silent and let others judge them and EARN a reputation for excellence.

Actually it is a lefty protesteth too much example. Other lefty examples include Deutsche Demokratische Republik, Social Sciences, Political Science, the New Democratic Party, Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.

ARC Centre also gave us the Ship of Fools expedition of Chris Turney, who wound up with nick name Christmas Turkey for his expedition into the freezing up sea ice that required an international rescue efforts costing millions. Oh they gave him a medal for it for God knows why – also typically lefty.

When Mickey Mann introduced himself to congress for his testimony back in March (I think), it was with the words “distinguished Professor”.

I don’t know what the norm might be in the US but is this usual?
Is there some formally recognised academic rank or status attached to “distinguished”?

In Oz or any other place I can think of, the use of the word “distinguished’ is only added when one is, say, introduced by another person at a speaking engagement or some such. It’s a politeness.
Adding the word yourself smacks of the heigh of conceit.

Maybe it’s all part of the pathology and the reason he passed himself off as a Nobel laureate?

I must say, I still don’t like it. I might be a somewhat too conservative.
I had the term ‘distinguished’ down with the likes of ‘my learned colleague’ or ‘the honourable member’ . . that sort of thing.

Since the blind watchmaker was debunked, biologists are left being unable to answer many questions about human ‘purposiveness’ and purposiveness in many life forms. Doesn’t mean there is a God or designer, but it does mean there is a large amount of ‘biology’ we don’t understand.

And where exactly is the research showing how a slight increase in temperature causes coral bleaching? All I can find is blanket statements like “the algae become stressed” or “algae leave the tissue”. Well maybe they just start to sweat too much and pack up their bags and take a holiday to the spa because they get “stressed”. This is sounding somewhat like the erroneous conventional wisdom that stress causes peptic ulcers.

It’s merely coincidental that slightly warmer sea surface temperatures typically coincide with decreased water circulation and mixing that the corals rely on to feed, right?

Well that’s exactly one of the things fueling my skepticism in the coral bleaching meme — when large patches of the GBR are subaerial exposed and a clear mechanism for coral mortality is presented, the alarmists still preach the meme. It’s clear to me that marine biologists have never seriously studied all the variables because the dogma of global warming.

I’ve only come across one paper that mentions the decrease in primary productivity in the water column coinciding with coral bleaching events, and even in that paper there really wasn’t any attention paid to nutrient levels, but rather UV levels. I would think that it’s a compounding effect; decreased nutrients (iron) decreases the primary production and limits the feeding ability of the polyp, the decrease in plankton makes the water column clearer during a time when the sky is inherently more cloud free (high pressure/high temp) and UV increases on the reef which damages the zooxanthellae, so then you have a situation where both feeding mechanisms of the coral is hindered at once, hence, the coral’s health suffers. It’s simply a convenient truth (for the alarmists) that these conditions coincide with relatively warmer temperatures, and if you follow the citation trail it looks like blinders were put on to focus primarily on warmer water from the beginning.

You would expect the starting polnt to be the measurement of sea temperatures around all the major corals since this would immediately indicate the range of temperatures that one knows tha corals can survive and indeed in which they flourish.

A couple of years ago WUWT had a thread on a survey that found that corals around uninhabited islands, about half the total surveyed showed no signs of stress, implying that heat and acidity were not what was stressing the others.

There is something strange in all these reports an effect that has actually been noticed and reported that the reef could actually just move south.http://theconversation.com/on-the-move-corals-migrate-south-into-nsws-warming-waters-8238
So make a big leap of faith and CAGW warming comes up by 2.5 degrees the NSW waters are then within the range for the corals. The corals themselves don’t actually have to adapt at all and one could argue that would be the most likely thing to happen is the just move south. What is strange is that the research funding on that is tiny compared to the doom and gloom story and that seems to be the criteria for dishing out the funding.

Just so I’m clear on the concept…
You can farm them in lagoons that get hotter, throw them in a plastic bag and ship them all over the world…
..they can sit out bone dry in full hot tropical sun..and rain…and do just fine
But 1 man made degree is going to kill them all….

That’s a VERY INCONVENIENT TRUTH, Lat ! We grow them in little glass boxes in horrendous conditions, break of 1″ pieces a ship them wrapped in damp tissue anywhere you want, and we grow them again, and again. Activist academics struggle with this concept.

A recent paper in Geology (Ries et al., 2009) found an unexpected relationship between CO2 and marine calcifers. 18 benthic species were selected to represent a wide variety of taxa: “crustacea, cnidaria, echinoidea, rhodophyta, chlorophyta, gastropoda, bivalvia, annelida.” They were tested under four CO2/Ωaragonite scenarios:

IMO what matters is the amount of CO2 in seawater for the photosynthesizing symbionts of corals. Warmer water holds less CO2, but more CO2 in the air also gets mixed in water in the wind-driven mixing layer.

The cold depths are a huge reservoir of CO2. Oceans were astonishingly hot during the Cretaceous Period, yet the ancestors of today’s scleractinian corals thrived.

Just before the Northern Hemisphere ice-sheet started melting some 17,000 years ago, world ocean levels were around 400 ft (~120 metres) lower than they are at the moment. So 17,000 years ago, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef did not exist.

“For that matter, the modern Great Barrier Reef also seems to like a CO2-enriched diet…”

Of course it does! There is not enough dissolved CO2 to supply all of the photosynthetic needs of the symbiotic zooxanthellae that live in coral tissue. In fact, there is an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase that can allow corals to utilize dissolved carbonates as an inorganic source of carbon for photosynthesis.

And, the more atmospheric CO2 that is present, the more is dissolved in water and converted to carbonates. So, yes, I totally can see how the GBR has enhanced calcification with higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Not to mention that corals evolved with the atmospheric CO2 concentration was many times higher than current levels, and probably still have the ability to utilize increases levels of dissolved CO2 even without conversion to carbonate.

I suspect bleaching events reduce the amount of available alkalinity, rapidly increase salinity, or rapidly change PAR levels (or all three simultaneously) that lead to corals expelling their zooxanthellae. El Nino is known to warm waters in the southeastern Pacific as well as suppress cloud cover, so it is not a stretch to think that bleaching is primarily an effect of ENSO.

> “There is still a lot to understand about corals,” says Dr. Torda. “While our only real chance for their survival is to reverse climate change, a nugget of hope exists – that the corals may be able to adapt to their changing environment,” he says.

Corals survived the Great Dying mass extinction event at the end of the Permian. Rugose or horny corals were indeed wiped out then, along with most other sea life, but scleractinian corals rapidly radiated to fill the niches left empty by their previously dominant kin.

Corals have survived everything that an abusive Mother Earth has thrown at them for about 500 million years. An extra molecule of CO2 in 10,000 dry air molecules, ie four instead of only three a century ago, is as nothing.

A little elementary science –
Coral reefs are built by coral organisms. They are made primarily of calcium carbonate. The corals take the calcium (Ca) and carbonate (CO3) from the sea water.
The calcification process involves a chemical reaction: Ca + 2 HCO3 (bicarbonate) –> CaCO3 + CO2 + H2O. The rate of this reaction is controlled by the availability of the scarcest component.
There are about 400 parts-per-million (ppm) of calcium in sea water. There are about 140 ppm of bicarbonate in sea water. The scarcest component is the bicarbonate. Adding more carbonate (by adding more CO2) to the ocean would make the calcification reaction faster.

The fact they endorse AGW is proof they’re frauds. Their church can’t even calculate the temperature of the atmosphere properly, attaining a temperature in line with the International Standard Atmosphere.

It is merely a cry for additional funding to study corals. Had they simply requested more funding it probably would have been ignored. They are just trying to advance their cause by becoming squeaky wheels.
We are lambasting it because it disingenuously uses language that presumes the latest boogeyman is to blame.

For as long as supplies last, Cornwall Alliance will send you a FREE copy of An Inconvenient Deception [by Roy Spencer] as our way of saying “Thank you!” for a gift of any size between now and the end of September! To take me up on this offer, just mention Promo Code 1709 and ask for An Inconvenient Deception when you make your gift of ANY size by credit card through our secure online donor site or by calling 703-569-4653, or when you mail your check to Cornwall Alliance, 9302-C Old Keene Mill Rd., Burke, VA 22015.

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The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation

Seems with some warmer waters which were more temperate may be more hospitable to corals that were not before. Perhaps we’ll see stag horn corals in North Carolina some day. Would be nice. Experimental ‘plantings’ in Florida may help damaged reefs as well. Plant a coral next “Earth Day”.,..

Corals reproduce and will keep on reproducing long after mankind is gone. Enormous swaths of coral have been found at the bottoms of previously dried-up seas. They’ve been around millions, and millions of years, and the current static atmospheric conditions, oscillating on either side of the nominal global atmospheric average temperature by about a half degree, isn’t really changing much at all.

If it were, there couldn’t be an international legal and regulatory physics standard called the International Standard Atmosphere. People aren’t being taught about the basics of atmospheric matter-energy relationships.

That international standard couldn’t exist, if climate were currently in a state of flux. That’s all there is to it.

While somewhat true, there are lots of efforts around sustainable aquaculturing, mariculturing, and education for responsible harvesting of specimens. Pollution and tourism are far more damaging to wild coral reefs.

– Corals evolve in the Cambrian-Ordovician under 10-30,000 ppm atmospheric CO2.
– 20th century CO2 increases from 300-400ppm.
– “Scientists” assert that 400ppm is dangerously high CO2 for corals.
– This tells you all you need to know about these “scientists”.
(And don’t jump on the speed of change cop-out, we don’t know the speed of change in the past, paleo records smooth this out massively.)

Center of Excellence? More like Center for Mediocrity.
The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef system composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching for over 2,300 kilometres (1,400 mi) over an area of approximately 344,400 square kilometres (133,000 sq mi). It stretches from 10 degrees south latitude to 20 degrees south. No water temperature variations north to south, and summer to winter?

The Oz BoM offers month-average SST anomalies that are based on NOAA data. From their menu offerings, here is the typically hottest month of February. The underlying warming trend is 0.0088 C/year (per download in Excel).

The annual volatility is massive relative to the underlying annual rate of change (which has persisted centennially). There are also a host of biology papers that indicate that corals are not threatened by that modest rate of change. For more than a year I’ve repeatedly advised some ten scientists* at the ARC-COE, AIMS, GBRMPA, and Melbourne University of this, but they remain in denial.

Trends for January and March are 0.0082 and 0.0085/year (2nd and 3rd hottest…..other months are significantly cooler)

Other data shows that the high annual volatility correlates primarily with poorly understood ocean circulation changes, including ENSO and also with interactive “weather”, both of which are unpredictable.
All the “experts” remain in denial of that too…..oh, and that includes the the Head of Science at Melbourne University and the Dean (a biologist).

Or was it just one weather-related El-Nino bleaching event that straddled 2016-2017 and they took measurements in both years? That gives them a two-for-the-price-of-one. It’s a trivial point, or should be, but they rarely miss a trick when it comes to attempted deception. I’d like to say my distrust is unprecedented, but then it would probably just be merelymistrust.

From the article: “A group of international scientists, including scientists from Australia, have issued advice that more research is urgently required to determine whether corals can acclimatise* and adapt to the rapid pace of climate change.”

What “rapid pace” of climate change? If you are referring to temperatures, they have been in a flat-line for 15 years.

Rapid pace! These people are not describing reality. You would think they could figure this out. I guess the money is too good, or the delusion too strong.

So the research has already been done and the results are presented right heer. Considering the past climate change that corals have survived, today’s climate change is trivial. On a much shorter time scale, corals survived the previous interglacial period, the Eemian, just fine even though it was warmer than today with higher sea levels and more ice cap melting. They also survived the last ice age and all of the Holocene that has been warmer than today. I would think that chemical polution might be more of a problem for corals than climate change. Anyway the climate change we are experiencing today is caused by the sun and the oceans over which Mankind has no control.

Notice the use of their latest weasel phrase “environmental change”. Great way to conflate any kind of manmade effect including actual pollution, with the fake “carbon pollution”, and its mythical effects on climate.

I gave up on headlines and began looking up and reading the actual research papers themselves not too long ago. Now I am not a climate scientist but I do have a scientific degree so I do understand how the scientific method works and any terms or phrases which I do not happen to understand I simply use something called a dictionary to help me out. I seem to recall that several of these corral reefs’s bleaching had been attributed to changing water levels and additionally that most if not all had already begun to recover on their own. I would gladly site multiple references but while updating my iphone with Apple’s latest version all of the papers and books which I had saved on my ebook app were wiped out. Did these fools simply ignore all of these papers which I have read or have they just been living in a cave somewhere and are just not aware of them?

There is sufficient inertia in the climate system that we will not be able to prevent further climate-related disturbances affecting the reef in the immediate future.

OTOH there’s a lot of inertia in the climate science community – they can’t move beyond the idea that CO2 causes irreversible warming; it’s all our fault; it can only get worse; sixth mass extinction blah blah blah

… is the wrong question. It should be: “Can corals survive climate science?”.
Oxybenzone, an increasingly common ingredient in modern sunscreens, seems
to be just a little genocidal where marine filter-feeders are concerned.

How much damage has been, and is being, caused to coral reefs by humans
researching reefs while using sunscreens at the same time?

Extinction or survival is a low bar approach to wildlife management and living life. Ecosystem services, opportunities and flourishing are the gold standard. Better questions are how much less valuable will reefs be under rapid climate change, apex predator decline, algae grazer decline, siltation and toxic releases from flooding unprotected human sources in extreme weather events and how many coral species will survive this multi dimensional rapid onslaught? Another good question is how will humans be impacted in a world of rapidly degraded ecosystem.

The ARC Center is the major player in the Great Barrier Reef Wars on the “all is lost — give us more money” side. The opposing forces are the Australian Government scientists working for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

The alarmists get a lot of support from the generalized CAGW funders internationally — calamity is a surefire way of raising research dollars.

The ARC Center on coral reefs has already declared the GBR dead several times onl be be called out and debunked by the GBRMRA — repeatedly.

Let’s try to be a little more honest. As usually, activists have oversimplified the nature and current extent of the threat. Coral thrived long ago when CO2 levels were much higher than today. Chemical and biochemical mechanisms exists that permit coral and other CaCO3 dependent organisms to thrive under these conditions. However, the coral species that exists today have adapted over the last several million years to suit recent environmental conditions, which were mostly ice ages with half of today’s level of CO2. The fact that earlier coral species did survive even higher CO2 is not proof that the majority of today’s species will do so.

Dr. S: Thanks for the link to the interesting video. As best I can tell, however, it didn’t contradict anything I said. There is a temperature threat to coral and a “CO2 threat” (ocean acidification). Given that coral grows under a range of temperature conditions, it should survive GW and move poleward. However, there is no where to escape from higher CO2.

Frank, we have data on the range of CO2 encountered and tolerated by modern corals. At all levels, there is no problem for corals likely that they have not demonstrated prior ability to handle. One way or another. They are not in fact receiving optimum CO2 overall. This blog is a good place to start for those who wish to understand….
The ‘excellence’ mob are just full of ‘it’.